Kimi For President

I was obviously in a prime position on the podium. I got that position again in the corner which I was privileged to be in again once more. From there you can just shoot whatever you see really and that tends to be people, flags, podium, parc ferme, teams, and every celebration obviously on the podium. You just can’t stop shooting to be honest and after the podium finished a lot of the fans stayed on the track and they paraded up and down, waving to all the TV crews. Some of them did spot me on top of the roof actually, not these ones in particular. It’s a really good atmosphere in Hungary and the fans go crazy. They’ve been there all day in the sun, enjoying themselves. They tend to take out that sort of happiness on the track when the race has finished. So it’s quite a funny moment, Kimi for president.

‘Bulls And Arrows’

At Turn 2 what we would generally do is do the grid, do all the grid preparations and whatever goes on. Then we are kicked off sort of 15 minutes before the start of the race. We then go into the paddock and down the stairs to where the photo area is, pick up the long lenses and then you literally go down to Turn 2. It’s quite a tight angle coming into that corner and obviously all the cars pile in there. There doesn’t seem to be many crashes there to be honest — more at Turn 1 where it’s tighter — but it’s still a nice group shot coming into that corner. I actually shot it more from the banking on the left, rather than shooting it head on. I thought I’d go for a slightly different angle, coming towards me which I think is quite nice.

An Interested Spectator

The bear one is quite funny from Hungary, only because it was put there by marshals. I saw it on the first day. It was basically watching TV on the first day. They had set a TV up on a stand and they put him on a chair and one of our photographers took some pictures of that. I knew I was going out there on Saturday morning before qualifying and I went out there quite early. They then put it into a swimming pool with a duck, amazingly like it was on holiday. They were giving it different scenarios to be in and I think it’s quite funny, it’s just nice to have some humour from the marshals. I have seen bears and ducks and various different animals but this was quite a big teddy bear, I guess that’s better because it stands out in the picture.

Can I Stand There Please, Lewis?

Some people just do the rear shot which is fine, but a load of guys from the back — I don’t particularly like it — but they think it’s quite moody. You are trying to create an atmospheric picture. It’s quite nice, I’ve seen some where the planes go over and things like that and that’s quite nice but it just gets a bit repetitive. I went round and I looked over and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I put my camera up, I could see Nico was behind and I thought ‘just let him in, it’s not difficult’.

I looked to the other end and Ericsson’s was the furthest to the left and he’s got loads of space and there’s actually a plaque on the floor where someone should be and maybe someone went in the wrong place. Obviously Nico seems to have got the hump, it looks like that to me with the pictures. Maybe the pictures tell the bad story I don’t know! Nico is staring right at him and I’m thinking — because I didn’t see these clips before I didn’t know what was going on — it looked like he was a bit p—– off about the fact that you want to be at the front at your home race.

Déjà Vu

He was there all weekend. He was at the football — I covered the football on the Wednesday night — and obviously that was an event for Michael, so we knew he was coming to the track. He was in Mercedes the first day I think on the Friday, pretty much spent all day in the back and then turned up with Michael’s PA on the Saturday and was in Ferrari, which was quite interesting. He had just been invited by the team to sit there and listen to what they say. Michael hid the kids from the limelight and when Mick started driving in karts they had this arrangement with the German media that they wouldn’t publish any pictures of his face. It was good to see him there and he’s obviously a cool kid. It was good to see them in the garage, at the end of the day he’s had a feel for what goes on and what works.

Ferrari’s Season In A Shot

This was just a bizarre one. I was walking behind the photo tower and there was a huge bang, I thought ‘what the hell was that’ thinking a car had hit a barrier. By the time I got around there the car was just sat in the middle of the track so I poked my camera through the fence. There was a nice sequence of him climbing out of the car. He wanted to run across the main straights to the pits but they wouldn’t let him. This is my favourite shot of the sequence because you’ve got the Mercedes in the distance and this picture probably sums up Ferrari’s season so far — lots of little issues and wasted opportunities while Mercedes have stayed out in front.

Procar Race

People love these Procar races, it was amazing seeing the reaction on social media to this race. This is something they used to do on a regular basis, putting drivers into one car for special races which formed its own championship. In Austria a bunch of the old guys went out, including Niki Lauda, on what was a bit more of a parade than a race. It was great to hear the roar of the engines, the pure power of a normally-aspirated engine.

It was a pretty good spectacle. Marc Surer went off on the first lap and then we saw him in the paddock trying to hide his face from everyone, he looked quite embarrassed. It was great to see some of the old timers there, they certainly enjoyed themselves being back in them. I’d love to see them doing something like this for modern F1 drivers because the fans enjoy it, it’s a bit different.

Awkward Halo

This was before Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari tested the Halo device at Silverstone. I think I captured this moment quite well. We obviously got the standard pictures of him going in and out of the garage with the Halo on but this a shot of him actually squeezing in and out of the car. This shows how awkward it is to get out, one of the main concerns about the device. Halo pretty much is the size of the cockpit but there’s another barrier to overcome for the driver or for a marshal extracting him from the car. One he had got out his foot nearly got caught on it as well, highlighting further reasons it perhaps needs revaluating before a decision is made.

Safety Car Start

It was pretty surreal being on the grid when this sudden downpour occurred. Everyone was scrambling around for new tyres, trying to not get their cockpits wet, finding umbrellas for their VIPs, it was a bit ridiculous! It was a shame — and controversial — they started under the Safety Car but these two shots show just how bad the spray was for those further back in the pack.

The first few laps were pretty chaotic because people changed immediately for intermediates, knowing it was already drying quite quickly. The only thing annoying about this picture is that you can see what looks like an empty grandstand in the background — it does not give a fair reflection of the Silverstone crowd at all. You can see the packed grandstand to the left, the one opposite the pit lane.

Celebrations

It was great seeing Lewis Hamilton’s celebrations at Silverstone. He genuinely went beyond what is expected of most drivers when they win a race, engaging with the fans and generally looking like he was having the time of his life. The champagne shots like this are always good fun as the drivers put aside any differences of frustrations and enjoy themselves on the podium for a brief moment. With the pendulum swinging between Hamilton and Nico Rosberg it’s important to get as many different shots of the pair as possible.

Winning Leap

This is a nice shot. I was stood on the podium tower and had a really good spot in the middle because I ran like hell to get there. You never know whether you’ll get a good position because FOM take up a lot of space with their boxes and cameras. I shot him on the 500mm as he came round the corner and parked up. He did this boxing celebration with reference to Muhammad Ali, jumped in the air and did this big salute. You can tell he’s happy even in mid air. I shot on the 500mm, which was the perfect lens and didn’t require much cropping. The result is a great celebration photo that tells a story of the Canadian Grand Prix.

Plastic Bag

This was really weird. I didn’t actually know what it was on his car until I got back to the media centre and looked at it in detail. I thought it was a bag, but I wasn’t really sure. Baku is called the windy city and it lives up to its name. As a result there was a bit of debris on the track, and although they did a good job of cleaning it every night, there is nothing you can do if it blows on the track during the race. In this instance it looked like a big blue bin liner and it got stuck on the suspension arm of Sebastian Vettel’s car. As he came onto the straight he hit a bump and it went up and split, it was very weird and lucky that no other car hit it.

Passing Move

It’s a long pit straight in Baku so you can see them coming a long way away and get great photos of slipstreaming and the cars using DRS. This was great to see three cars alongside each other, especially as it’s three different cars. Photo wise, I think it was one of the best overtaking manoeuvres of the weekend. To have them battling into that corner is great and it’s because the track is so wide at that point. After the corner it narrows and that’s where Max Verstappen got screwed by the other two.

On The Way To The Grid

The grid girls had to walk from the media centre in the Hilton hotel to the grid across this central plaza area. This was taken ahead of the GP2 race and presented a great opportunity to capture some of the glamour of F1 with a nice backdrop of the beautiful buildings you have all around the centre of Baku. They were striding across the square in what was almost a military style, which created a different but stylish photo.

Podium Pose

Nico Rosberg received a beautiful trophy for his efforts in Baku. It was made to look like a ball of fire because Azerbaijan is known as the Land of Fire. It also has the colours of the flag on it and it was beautifully made. The drivers do love a different trophy and I think this offers that because it looks like a torch. Nico does this thing where he builds up the anticipation with the crowd before he lifts the trophy and they all cheer when he holds it above his head. I saw that it took pride of place on the plane home to Monaco, which he shared with some of the other drivers.

Sign Him Up

The charity football match is always a good event to kick off the Monaco weekend. Fernando Alonso was the star of the whole thing, of course, with his free kick which was picked up by all the news channels. This shot is of that kick, he curled it over the wall like a pro! I don’t cover football, never have except from this match every year, but I quite enjoy doing it as it is something quite different to snapping an F1 event. It’s nice to see the drivers having fun in a unique environment, they actually got kicked around a bit by the pro team! Leicester City boss Claudio Ranieri was there as well — it’s funny actually, he was there last year without a job and this year he was there as a Premier League champion.

Monaco Baby

This is what Monaco is all about, people associate it with the beautiful and the glamorous and this picture manages to get all of that into one shot. These girls were here for most of the race and it provided a good shot with the backdrop of Lewis Hamilton and Daniel Ricciardo fighting for the lead at Nouvelle Chicane with the yachts in the background. Of course, the key is to get cars in to get the whole shot perfect and that’s why I like this one. We tried to get the girls to wave up to us but they were too busy taking pictures of each other to pay much attention!

Dickie Bow

This is the Amber Lounge fashion show before Monaco and Daniel Ricciardo had showed up a bit late. They get measured for their tailored suits and have a load of make-up done, it’s the full treatment. Ricciardo was late so he was running around getting sorted out and then he couldn’t put his dickie bow on! I managed to get the shot as he was being helped, I don’t know if he’d ever put one on before. I don’t know if anyone else was there from Red Bull, he seemed to be there on his own, but the team loves this sort of thing as it promotes the brand. You can tell Ricciardo enjoyed himself; he did a bit of a dance with the singer on stage with all the energy he usually has.

Lewis and the Biebs

I had a lot of backlash on this on Instagram, abuse for Justin Bieber and Lewis Hamilton. They seem to be quite polarising figures. A lot of people were asking why he was there and why Hamilton gave him the champagne before celebrating with the team, all this stuff. To be honest, at first I thought it was Eminem! We saw a quick glance of him on the big screen and it was only when he wandered past us on the grid that we realised who it was. It was a bit strange for Bieber to just be stood there but I guess it’s good for F1 trying to engage with a younger audience and seeing them both enjoying a pally moment was something a bit different and a reminder of Lewis’ fame away from the sport. If there’s a place to watch F1 it’s Monaco — it’s hard not to be impressed with F1 cars when they are flying around the circuit, so close to the wall, so I’m sure Bieber had a good time.

Blessed

Lewis often says he feels “blessed” and he made the most of it on the podium, pointing to the sky and doing the crucifix type shot when celebrating. I guess he was blessed, a bit, because he wouldn’t have won that race without Red Bull messing up their pit stop. It’s a special place for him, like it is with all the drivers, and he had waited since 2008 to win there again. It was also that 44th win he’s been waiting eight races to claim and cut a big gap to Nico Rosberg in the championship so seemed to be a significant moment for both Hamilton and to the 2016 title fight as a whole.

Casualties of War

We didn’t catch the Mercedes collision — Turn 4 is not a usual place for a photographer to stand on the first lap as it’s usually unlikely anything will happen there. The one agency that caught it was doing some work for a sponsor, much like how I got lucky and captured Sebastian Vettel’s engine blowup in Bahrain while doing stuff for DHL — sometimes that’s how it goes. While the race was going I had BBC radio coverage on in my ear and they remarked how sad it was to see the cars sat under covers in parc ferme and so I shot over there as quick as I could.

I think this is a nice image as it’s something different and looks fairly dramatic. I had to get this signed off by the FIA before sending it out because I wasn’t sure if it was actually in parc ferme and an area I’m not allowed to shoot in — I don’t know how it works because I was told it doesn’t become parc ferme until the race finished. Either way, it was a nice shot to get as it was very different to what anyone else got — it has a doomsday feel to it.

Master and Apprentice

This was a good shot as it was Dr Helmut Marko who played a big role in Verstappen’s early elevation to Red Bull ahead of the race. I don’t think even Marko would have imagined how it panned out in real life, but this photograph was a bit like master and apprentice celebrating a job well done. Just after this Daniel Ricciardo came over and congratulated Max which was great to see — he was disappointed in how his own race turned out but seemed genuinely pleased for Verstappen. Shooting the first Verstappen-Red Bull celebration felt like the first of many, somehow… I think it’s a sight we’re going to get very used to in the next few years.

Do It Yourself

This was early in the race and a good example of how it sometimes pays to be in the right place at the right time. I had see the car smoking on the screen in front of me and before I knew it he came round the corner and to a stop just in front of me. After climbing out, Hulkenberg pointed the marshal to go round the back but he went around slowly and didn’t know how to open it. I think Hulkenberg got a bit impatient, grabbed the fire extinguisher off the marshal and initially doused the marshal with it before doing the back of the car. I think the marshals are scared of doing more damage to the car in those moments.

History Maker

Seeing Verstappen spray the champagne was amusing when you kept being reminded how young he was — I don’t think he would have needed many drinks to celebrate his win! It’s funny to think he’s still not legal to drink in some of the places on the calendar. But what a remarkable debut. To adapt that quickly to a new car and keep calm under that pressure from Kimi Raikkonen was really fantastic. The race fell into his lap a little bit but the driver still has to deliver and he absolutely did that. It felt like a landmark moment in what should be a very good career.

The Man of the Hour

There was heightened attention around Verstappen all week and on the grid was no different. There has been a noticeable increase in Dutch journalists since he made his debut and I only imagine that number will continue to rise in the coming weeks and months now that he’s claimed his first victory. On the grid there was one man all the photographers seemed to be interested in, obviously none of us knew the kind of race that was about to unfold in front of us.

Fancy A Drive, Max?

This is one of those photos that suddenly had more meaning the following week. I had just come to the paddock after the autograph signing. Max Verstappen went over to Red Bull and started talking to Helmut Marko with his manager and dad, Jos, and there’s me thinking they were just talking about 2017! I got a few shots of them talking because I was aware of the link with next year, but thought nothing of it. When I saw the news last week of Verstappen replacing Daniil Kvyat I suddenly remembered this set of photographs and realised it was very newsworthy. This was obviously before Kvyat’s crash on Sunday and the revelation the following week but who knows, maybe the driver switch had already been mentioned at this point?

The Powers That Be

This is Bernie Ecclestone on the grid with Russia’s deputy prime minister Dmitry Kozak. Just after the national anthem I followed them, they were trying to get rid of me but Bernie said it was OK. The deputy prime minister had his son with him and they asked Christian Horner to show him the car. While that was happening, Bernie is chatting to him on the grid explaining to him what’s happening and I don’t think anyone else got these shots. It’s just one of those moments you just have to capture. Vladimir Putin arrived later and we got the usual shot of his chat with Bernie in the grandstand opposite the media centre but I liked this one better as its up close to the pair having a talk.

Seventh Heaven

This was a wonderful shot in parc ferme. We didn’t get many shots of Rosberg during the race – away from the ordinary ones of the start, pit stops, finish shots –because he was so lonely out in front. When he pulled up the car he went looking for his mechanics and jumped in there, just like a rock star doing a crowd surf during a gig. From this elevated angle it made a really nice shot. It’s a happy moment — you want to see the drivers happy and celebrating these wins and this picture shows plenty of emotion at his seventh win in a row.

Four Wheels Good, Two Wheels Better

I lucked in a bit with this one; a lot of things came down the inside of the circuit after the carnage at the first few corners. Sebastian Vettel came back after his shunt with Daniil Kvyat and I don’t think a lot of people would have got this because he crashed so far through Turn 3. This is what I call ‘a man moment’ — Vettel doesn’t want to be on the back, he just wants to drive the motorbike. The drivers do like to drive cars, they hate other people driving them around. I guess they like to stay in control. Just after this is taken, the marshal starts waving Vettel’s helmet in the air so he was clearly having a lot of fun himself.

The Aeroscreen

This was the big story on Thursday and Friday in Russia, with Red Bull doing the seat fitting and then running the Aeroscreen the following morning. They tried to hide it at first because I think they were worried about showing people how the canopy is actually attached to the car, they had it behind all the mechanics. When they rolled it out on Friday morning we got a lot of close up shots but there was a ridiculous amount of photographers, it must have been about ten deep. We got a great collection of shots from his lap, like we did with the Ferrari Halo tests earlier in the year. I think with this Red Bull design they have a real chance to do something very interesting for broadcasting purposes, whether it’s LED lights on the front with driver numbers or name, something like they do in IndyCar.

Blowout

This was one of the key moments of the race and pretty dramatic. You get plenty of time to see them coming down the backstraight in China when standing where I was and the tyre actually blew out with quite a way to go. This shot is good as you’ve got Ricciardo trying to navigate the turn and keep an eye on his mirrors, he needs to get on the inside to pit at the next corner but he’s about to be passed by everyone as well. This is the tyre of shot you see happen in front of you and you just shoot through the corner. An added bonus is that it always creates a great shot when the tyre comes completely off the wheel like that.

Remonstrations

I imagine this was a bit of an awkward moment for Sebastian Vettel. Immediately after the race he hunted Kimi Raikkonen down and was gesticulating quite a lot with his hands, probably trying to explain what happened in the build-up to their contact at Turn 1. This obviously continue with him and Daniil Kvyat before the podium ceremony but it showed that Vettel’s immediate thoughts after the race were about making things right with Raikkonen. The framing looks tight and that’s because of where all this took place — while all this was happening, Nico Rosberg is not too far away celebrating on his car in parc ferme, the shots I would usually be snapping from this sort of vantage point.

Six in a row

It must have been a pretty lonely race for Nico Rosberg. He led from the front and sometimes its easy to overlook the job that goes into winning a race when you lead the entire grand prix. These are always good shots, Rosberg here is crossing the line and waving to his guys on the pit wall — people always want to see some emotion from their drivers, win or lose. Things have gone pretty perfectly for him this season and if anything it’s a great way for 2016 to unfold because now the onus is on Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari to catch up.

The centre of attention

This is similar to the shot from Bahrain behind Lewis, with all the photographers snapping him. This was just before the drivers’ parade but instead of joining those guys on the floor I thought I would do something a little different and shoot from above. Sometimes doing that helps you get a greater perspective of what the drivers see and what is around them. This is another example of the attention Lewis has during a race weekend and of course he’s got that phone with him!

Paddock glamour

This was on Saturday before qualifying. There are always grid girls in the paddock and they are usually dressed differently depending on where the race is being held. These were quite striking outfits and this girl stuck out — the rest of her colleagues are blurred due to the type of lens I’m using. As a photography agency you always wanted to provide as many photos from a race weekend and this type of shot adds some nice colour and variety to what we deliver.